Page 23 of Hers By Summer’s End

“Are you certain?” he asked. There was a novel roughness to his tone that sent heat blazing through her core.

“Absolutely certain.”

She surged forward at the exact instant he tilted in, their mouths meeting in a jarring, unceremonious collision that felt nothing like the daydream she’d indulged in over the past few weeks. No matter. She was far too stubborn to let a slight impact ruin this.

Before he could pull back to assess the damage, she softened her grip on his coat, tilted her head, and pressed back in with a slower, far more deliberate precision. The immediate, full warmth of his mouth against hers nearly made her knees buckle. They were kissing! Not sniping, not teasing, but kissing. And he seemed to be enjoying it. A low murmur vibrated against her lips as his hand slid down her spine, splaying firmly across her lower back to lock her against him.

The trouble was, she couldn’t seem to find the rhythm. Every time he shifted, she tried to follow, to mold herself to him. But she was always an agonizing fraction of a second behind, her brain intent on tripping up her instincts. She was mortifyingly aware of how tightly her fingers were once again clutching his coat, of the embarrassing little pants escaping her throat. Could he tell? Could he feel how out of her depth she was?

In a bid to convince him she knew what she was doing, she attempted an alluring flick of her tongue. Instead, her tooth snagged his lower lip. He let out a grunt of pain, and she jerked backward, stunned by her lack of ability. Drew’s lower lip was visibly reddened, bearing the distinct, damning mark of her front teeth.

Horror instantly doused any remaining heat in her veins.

“I…” She forced her eyes away from his lip—and away from the insane urge to lean back in and lick the spot to soothe it. “I’d better leave before I make matters worse.”

She spun on her heel, every single nerve screaming for immediate evacuation. How, precisely, was she expected to face him again? She had accused him of faithlessness, thrown herself at him, and then proven, beyond a reasonable doubt, that she was catastrophically bad at kissing.

“Cecelia, wait.”

Absolutely not. It was time to disappear, spend the rest of the summer avoiding Fourteenth Street, and devote herself exclusively to her experiments. She wrapped her fingers around the door handle and pulled. Nothing happened. She frowned and yanked harder, but the door refused to budge.

“It's locked,” she said in surprise. She leaned in, peering through the small glass pane. A flash of movement in the yard caught her eye. “And your Granddad is hobbling away as fast as he can.”

CHAPTER SIX

“Granddad!”

When the shameless schemer failed to answer Drew’s third bellow, he rested his forehead against the glass pane and shook his head in disbelief. Shifting his weight, he discreetly adjusted his deflated prick with a grimace.

Damn it all.

Not only had he made a complete hash of what was almost certainly the only time he would ever hold Cecelia in his arms, but now the unlucky woman was trapped inside his humid, unkempt greenhouse.

In his fantasies, their first kiss had always been slow and thorough and memorable for all the right reasons. Instead, the moment her soft lips touched his, all the blood in his body had pooled in his groin. He'd kissed her like a starving man after twelve rounds in the ring and practically convulsed with need when her tooth scraped his lip. No wonder she had bolted for the door.

“What are the chances he’s coming back?” Cecelia asked.

Drew huffed out a miserable laugh and turned around. Cecelia stood beside his award-winning tea roses, bright-eyed and flushed, errant dark curls tumbling out from under her bowler. She was so breathtakingly disheveled that he was momentarily lost for words. Then his gaze snagged on her lips, which were swollen from their kiss and pressed together not in disapproval, as he would have expected, but as if she were fighting a smile.

“Does this new predicament amuse you?” he asked with some incredulity.

One shoulder lifted. “Seems a rather fitting end to this farce of a day.”

“Suppose that’s true. It could only get worse if…” A thought occurred to him, and he winced. “If it’s two o’clock.”

She consulted the silver fob watch pinned to her blouse. “Five minutes ’til the hour,” she confirmed. “What does that mean?”

“Granddad naps every afternoon at two. Once he’s down, we won’t see him for another hour or two.”

“Like I said—farcical.” She chuckled again, and the sound melted the tight, desperate coil in his stomach. “I should be cross but watching him totter toward the house, as slow and determined as a tortoise, was simply too funny.”

“I can break the latch,” he offered, reaching for the door handle. “Let you out.”

“Don’t you dare.” She swatted his hands away from the wooden frame with a fierce glower. “You only just finished repairing the greenhouse. I won't have you undoing all that work because I happened to get myself locked inside.”

He hesitated. Not because of the latch, which he could fix in ten minutes, but because removing it meant letting her go. Damnit, he wasn’t ready to watch her walk away after one disastrous kiss as if that’s all there was to them. Not when Granddad's meddling had handed him a second chance. He cast about for a way to ask for another kiss without sounding like a desperate cretin⁠—

“I owe you an apology,” she announced, “for behaving quite badly.”